The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Underwhelmed

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2025-12-16

Our anonymous submitter was looking for a Microsoft partner to manage his firm's MSDN subscriptions; the pile of licenses and seats and allowed uses was complex enough to want specialists. In hopes of quickly zeroing in on a known and reputable firm, he tracked down the website of a tech consultancy that'd been used by one of his previous employers.

When he browsed to their Contact Us page, filled out the contact form, and clicked Submit, the webpage simply refreshed with no signs of actually doing anything. After staring at the screen for a moment, wondering what had gone wrong, Subby noticed the single quotes used within his message were now escaped. Clicking Submit a few more times kept adding escape characters, with no submission ever occurring. So he amended his message to remove every it's, we're, and other such contraction.

8 comments - Last comment @ 15:12

Duplicate Reports

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-15

Today's anonymous submitter sends us a short snippet. They found this because they were going through code committed by an expensive third-party contractor, trying to track down a bug: every report in the database kept getting duplicated for some reason.

This code has been in production for over a decade, bugs and all:

20 comments - Last comment @ 10:59

Anonymice

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-12-12

Three blind anonymice are unbothered by the gathering dark as we approach the winter solstice. Those of you fortunate enough to be approaching the summer solstice are no doubt gloating. Feel free, we don't begrudge it. You'll get yours soon enough. Here we have some suggestions from a motley crew of three or four or maybe more or fewer.

Mouse Number One is suffering an identity crisis, whimpering "I don't really know who I am anymore and I really hoped to have this information after modifying my profile."

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-13

Tis the Season(al Release)

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-11

We recently asked for some of your holiday horror stories. We'll definitely take more, if you've got them, but we're going to start off with Jessica, who brings us not so much a horror as an omen.

Jessica writes:

26 comments - Last comment @ 15:16

The Modern Job Hunt: Part 2

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2025-12-10

(Read Part 1 here)

By the 10-month mark of her job search, Ellis still lacked full-time employment. But she had accumulated a pile of knowledge and advice that she wished she'd started with. She felt it was important to share, in hopes that even one person might save some time and sanity:

9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-13

The Article

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-09

When writing software, we like our code to be clean, simple, and concise. But that loses something, you end up writing just some code, and not The Code. Mads's co-worker wanted to make his code more definite by using this variable naming convention:

public static void addToListInMap(final Map theMap, final String theKey, final Object theValue) {
	List theList = (List) theMap.get(theKey);
	if (theList == null) {
		theList = new ArrayList();
		theMap.put(theKey, theList);
	}
	theList.add(theValue);
}

28 comments - Last comment @ 09:55

The Magic Array

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-08

Betsy writes:

I found this snippet recently in a 20-year-old RPG program.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-12

A Horse With No Name

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-12-05

Scared Stanley stammered "I'm afraid of how to explain to the tax authority that I received $NaN."

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-08

Pawn Pawn in in Game Game of of Life Life

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-04

It feels like ages ago, when document databases like Mongo were all the rage. That isn't to say that they haven't stuck around and don't deliver value, but gone is the faddish "RDBMSes are dead, bro." The "advantage" they offer is that they turn data management problems into serialization problems.

And that's where today's anonymous submission takes us. Our submitter has a long list of bugs around managing lists of usernames. These bugs largely exist because the contract developer who wrote the code didn't write anything, and instead "vibe coded too close to the sun", according to our submitter.

5 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-05

The Thanksgiving Shakedown

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2025-12-03

On Thanksgiving Day, Ellis had cuddled up with her sleeping cat on the couch to send holiday greetings to friends. There in her inbox, lurking between several well wishes, was an email from an unrecognized sender with the subject line, Final Account Statement. Upon opening it, she read the following:

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-04

The Destination Dir

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-02

Darren is supporting a Delphi application in the current decade. Which is certainly a situation to be in. He writes:

I keep trying to get out of doing maintenance on legacy Delphi applications, but they keep pulling me back in.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-07

Formula Length

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-01

Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering states "No matter what the requirements document says, what your users really wanted was Excel." This has a corrolary: "Any sufficiently advanced Excel file is indistingushable from software."

Given enough time, any Excel file whipped up by any user can transition from "useful" to "mission critical software" before anyone notices. That's why Nemecsek was tasked with taking a pile of Excel spreadsheets and converting them into "real" software, which could be maintained and supported by software engineers.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-02

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